


Have I Always Loved You?

by alekstraordinary



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Bittersweet, Confessions, Dancing, Established Relationship, Feelings, Fluff, Historical Refernces, M/M, Slow Dancing, Warm and Fuzzy Feelings, ish, it's cute, not really but kind of
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-03
Updated: 2019-08-03
Packaged: 2020-07-30 09:57:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,286
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20095411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alekstraordinary/pseuds/alekstraordinary
Summary: "For Heaven's sake, angel," Crowley spoke up at around four in the morning, shifting as he sat on the floor of Aziraphale's bookshop in the midst of at least dozen boxes full of gramophone recordings. "How many goddamn... ah, fuck," he grunted when his movement caused one of the boxes to tip over, some of the vinyls spilling out. "How many goddamn recordings do you have?!"akaAziraphale and Crowley finally mature enough to talk about their feelings. And dance. In their defense, it only took them six thousand and twenty-three years.





	Have I Always Loved You?

**Author's Note:**

> Hello it turns out that I am in fact able to write fluff sometimes. There are bittersweet moments of course but mostly it's sweet and painless so everyone say "thank you Aleks for not hurting us this time".  
This time the companion song is "Have I Always Loved You?" by Copeland.  
Enjoy!

It was a rather exceptionally warm weather with a rather exceptionally clear sky one summer night in 2018, when the lights of an antique bookshop in London's Soho still shone bright well into the night, illuminating the street in front of it with stripes of brightness seeping through the closed blinds. There was a nightingale singing somewhere high on top of the building, making the heated air so much sweeter, but probably nobody heard it through the humming signs of life down below, as this city never truly slept, especially not there. Perhaps the night life is exactly the reasons as to why nobody really paid attention to the light in that odd shop's windows, as they never did, since A. Z. Fell's store was rather widely known to be open at weirdest of times and seem to have people shifting inside of it after closing at the oddest of hours, as if the owner of it never slept. He didn't, in fact, but that's nothing anyone really knew about, so for almost every single soul in Soho that night, it was a night like any other. And it would have been very much the same as every other night, if it wasn't for what was happening inside of the said antique bookshop.

It rarely happened that there was more than one person in there after the closing hours, showing yet again that the owner was rather a loner. Truthfully, the past days the odd shop was even more odd than usual--the sign with the opening hours was changing every few hours and it was simply impossible to get inside at all, and even if one had enough luck to slip inside, they would be greeted by the owner walking to and fro, carrying various boxes and babbling away about something outlandish to a red-haired gentleman with sunglasses on, spread over one of the chairs more like some sort of a snake or a vine than a person. The visit there wouldn't take long anyway because the clearly restless owner would make an excuse to ask whoever came in out before locking the door and lowering the blinds for the rest of the day. Truly, truly curious, even for the ones who were somewhat used to Mr. Fell acting in a rather eccentric way. But things were different, they were very much different for those days, indeed. You see, what was different was that there was more movement, more excitement and perhaps also a little bit of fear. 

Things were changing.

"For Heaven's sake, angel," Crowley spoke up at around four in the morning, shifting as he sat on the floor of Aziraphale's bookshop in the midst of at least dozen boxes full of gramophone recordings. "How many goddamn... ah, fuck," he grunted when his movement caused one of the boxes to tip over, some of the vinyls spilling out. "How many goddamn recordings do you have?!" 

Aziraphale looked at him with a cocked eyebrow from by one of the bookshelves where he was busy picking out his most valued books and putting them gently into even more boxes. They didn't have to do it this way, they could just use their powers to miracle everything to be packed right away, but since Heaven and Hell might have been still be keeping an eye out for the uses of supernatural powers, it was safer to do it the old-fashioned, human way. Besides, Aziraphale would never forgive himself if he accidentally forgot something important. "Language, my dear," he said as he turned his eyes back to the shelf. "And to answer your question, I simply enjoy music. You've got quite a few recordings in your car as well."

With a sight of frustration, Crowley busied himself with trying to gather the discs back to their rightful place. "_Tapes_, angel, I've got _tapes_" he muttered, his sunglasses slipping down his nose. "And I have a lot of them because if I leave them in for too long, they'll all turn into _Queen's Greatest Hits_ and I don't always want to listen to Queen. I'm sick of _Bo-Rhap_. And don't even get me started on _Under Pressure_."

"What's that, dear?" Aziraphale blinked at him with confusion.

"Ah, you wouldn't get it." Crowley just turned back to the vinyls, pulling them one by one and looking at the titles, most of them written in Aziraphale's elegant cursive. "Waltz, waltz, waltz, waltz... why do you have so many waltzes? What's the point? They're all the same." 

Aziraphale took out one last book before covering the box tightly and picking it up. "They're not all the same, and you of all people should know that. You met Johann Strauss, haven't you? I think I even introduced you to him." 

The demon shrugged his shoulders as he flipped through some more recordings. "I talked to him once or twice," he admitted, trying to busy himself with something other than watching Aziraphale move across the shop. Even now, after all that's happened he's still... skittish when it comes to being open with... anything. Well, he wasn't really open, he was still working on letting himself at least look at Aziraphale when the angel could actually see it, but who knows? Maybe it would come with time. Being more comfortable. For now, it was good the way it was.

"Ah, you've missed on quite a lot then," Aziraphale chirped, his tone changing as it did whenever he spoke of something related to art, as he put the box next to the others, at least two dozens piling up by the door leading to the small apartment above. "I spent a lot of time talking to him when I was visiting Vienna a while ago. Quite a charming man he was, really charming, really. He was a tad shy at first, I must admit, especially with my unpolished German, but once he's warmed up to you he was just a delight to talk to, truly a..."

Crowley raised his eyebrows over the rim of his sunglasses. 

"Right." Aziraphale cleared his throat. "Well, anyway," he recollected himself as he stepped closer to Crowley, reaching into the same box. Their hands brushed over each other briefly, and somehow it was enough for Crowley's heart to do a flip. "Johann himself wrote over five hundred pieces of music, most of which were waltzes. So, as you can judge by that number alone, means that they're not all the same, each one of them is has a completely different emotion to it, a completely different tone. Granted, you technically can dance to almost all of them the same way, but-" 

"Dance?" Crowley interjected, leaning back a little bit and cocking his head to the side. "Didn't take you for much of a dancer."

Aziraphale's cheeks flushed up slightly as he gave Crowley a look out of wide hazel eyes before averting them rapidly and focusing them on the vinyls. "A-ah, well. There's not much to talk about, really. I... picked it up sometime in the nineteenth century. By the end, and then the beginning of twentieth. I learned a bit, I was rather good at gavotte and-"

"Gavotte? What's that?" 

"Nothing, really! Nothing of great importance." Aziraphale stood up and adjusted his waistcoat. He didn't really have to do that, but by now Crowley knew how to recognize a tic. The way Aziraphale adjusted his clothes or rubbed his hands was always a sign of nervousness, much alike to Crowley's own hissing. "But as I was trying to say, I learned to dance waltz here and there. I used to be rather engaged with humans' communities and it was expected to know how to dance." The angel fell silent for a moment. "Why are you asking?" he wanted to know, giving the demon a hint of a smile, the corners of his eyes crinkling. "You aren't going to ask me to dance with you, are you?" 

Crowley stared up at Aziraphale for a second, two, three. He didn’t even think of that, really, if anything he was just trying to tease the angel a little bit, but not what he’s mentioned it, Crowley felt a sudden urge to say yes, of course, let’s try that. Obviously, he didn’t really want to dance, but there were just so many reasons to agree to the suggestion. Aziraphale clearly loved waltzes, for once, and dancing seems to be yet another human pleasure he likes indulging himself with, let alone that this would give them an opportunity to be close… which as much terrifying as it was, it was also something that Crowley has been yearning for since they met on the wall of Eden. What Aziraphale was suggesting was a form of intimacy that neither of them ever dared to even think of, but the words were now spoken and they hung heavily in the air between them. 

Good Lord, the badly hidden hope in Aziraphale’s eyes alone was enough to make something inside Crowley’s chest tremble. “I…” he said slowly, “I don’t think demons are very good dancers. I had a shot at it in the eighties and it was not my proudest moment.” 

“Oh, but that’s nothing to be ashamed of!” the angel said enthusiastically as he picked out one of the records out of the box and made his way to the back of the room, to where a rather old gramophone was standing. “We’re pretty much finished with packing anyway, I think we deserve to indulge ourselves a little bit. I can teach you.” 

“This is going to be a disaster,” Crowley just murmured to himself as he dragged his lanky body from the floor, rolling his shoulders and giving a groan. He rolled up the sleeves of his shirt as he watched Aziraphale set up the music, trying to mentally prepare himself for the fiasco this was going to be. Demons really weren’t good dancers. 

Aziraphale returned to him beaming as music started seeping out of the gramophone. “Don’t be so grim, my dear. It’s going to be fine, I’ll guide you through everything.” He stopped right in front of Crowley, barely half a step away, close enough for the demon to be able to feel the heat radiating from his body. “Right. Could you give me your hand?” 

Oh. Oh, Lord. “Say what now?” 

“Your hand, please. Right one. I can’t really teach you how to waltz without that, it’s one of the main parts of the dance.”

Crowley hesitated for a moment, a ball suddenly growing in his throat, but he slowly complied and raised up his hand, letting Aziraphale take it into his own and position their arms. Aziraphale’s hand was soft and much warmer than Crowley’s own and his nails were really nice, and… he snapped himself out of this train of thought. He might have feel like a mushy mess on the inside but he certainly didn’t have to--nor did he want to--let it show. Just because things had changed doesn’t mean that Crowley was going to change the way he behaved as well. He was not ready for that kind of vulnerability and he doubted that he ever would be. What was he losing his head over, anyway? It’s just a stupid dance. 

“Now put your other hand on my shoulder,” Aziraphale further instructed, unashamedly looking straight at Crowley’s face, as if he could see through the tinted lenses of the sunglasses. “A little more to the left. No, your left. Yes, that’s better. Now,” he said as he reached out and rested his hand on Crowley’s shoulder blade as softly and gently as if the demon was made out of goddamn glass. “Straighten your back. Lovely. Now, step back with your right foot.”

“My…” Crowley needed solid five seconds to remember which side is right before dropping his gaze and taking a faltering step as Aziraphale told him to. 

“Good. Now step back with your left.”

He’s got it.

“Now move your right foot to your left foot.” 

He hasn’t got it.

They took a few rather poor attempts but Crowley just got increasingly frustrated. He missed out on this whole dance-fascination period when he was taking his century-long nap and now it was just too late for him. Demons weren’t made to dance--demons weren’t made to be allowed any pleasures at all, which was one of the main reasons as to why Crowley never ate when he invited Aziraphale out. Food just didn’t have any taste to him and his coordination and sense of rhythm clearly were non-existent as well. He knew it was going to be a disaster and a disaster it was, but still he enjoyed Aziraphale’s closeness way too much to just give up on this whole ordeal altogether.

Instead, he could do what he did best. Change the rules.

“Oh for…!” he exclaimed with irritation as he nearly stepped on Aziraphale’s foot yet again. 

“Don’t worry about that,” Aziraphale tried soothing him down with this gentle voice of his. “It takes a while sometimes, I couldn’t quite get it at first either, it’s…”

“To Hell with that!” Crowley just grunted, sliding his right hand off and wrapping it around the angel’s waist, pulling him even closer. He was still holding to Aziraphale’s other hand, but he lowered both of their arms so they could be more comfortable while using the little height difference there was to his advantage and nearly pressing his cheek against the side of Aziraphale’s head, successfully avoiding further eye contact. “Just c’mere.” 

Aziraphale froze. “Crowley…?” 

There was that stir in Crowley’s gut again and feeling how warm Aziraphale was, pressed up against him really wasn’t helping with the panic slowly arising. “We’re dancing,” he muttered as he swayed on his feet and shifted ever so slightly, pulling the angel with him. “Just slower. Baby steps, ‘nd all.” 

It took a few more seconds before the impossible tenseness disappeared from Aziraphale’s form and he relaxed in Crowley’s arms a bit more, melted almost and moved in this awkward parody of a dance. This was… quite possibly the closest they had ever been to each other, and even though neither angels nor demons were exactly big on touching, Crowley had to admit that this was quite nice. It calmed down the painful longing he’s been carrying around on his shoulders like a weight ever since he’s realized that he’s developed some sort of feelings for Aziraphale. That was yet another really complicated matter, something that he wasn’t able to solve even though over six thousand years have passed. Was what he felt love? Was he even capable of feeling love? His Fall was supposed to crush away this ability of his, wasn’t it? Since angels were beings of love and demons were supposed to be broken and disfigured version of that, logically Crowley shouldn’t be supposed to love. But, Lord, it felt like he did and he loved so intensely it brought him pain on more than one occasion, but no matter how hard he tried, no matter what he did, it was still there.

And now was the first time like he thought that all this love he was able to feel against his own demonic nature could be something more than just yet another source of suffering and humiliation.

“I suppose this is rather nice,” Aziraphale sighed after a second, sliding his hand over Crowley’s back a little.

_Funny_, Crowley thought to himself. This was the first time since… this was the first time he’s ever experienced something what humans would call physical affection yet somehow it felt as though he was longing for it his whole existence. But that didn’t, make sense, did it? How could you possibly miss something you’ve never had?

They swayed like this for a good moment, silent, enjoying something they never knew they needed until that exact moment. The waltz was too fast-paced for the way they were dancing, but it didn’t really seem to matter. Nothing really seemed to matter in that moment other than just the two of them. For a few, truly blessed moments it was as if the whole world was gone after all and they were the only ones remaining. But the longer they stayed quiet, the more various emotions were bubbling up in Crowley’s stomach--emotions he was absolutely unfamiliar with and couldn’t even begin to comprehend and he worried that if this silence would stretch, all of this would spill out and he would completely bare himself to Aziraphale.

“Hey, angel?” he asked softly, way softer than he originally intended to. 

“What’s that, my dear?” 

“Are you sure about this?” 

Aziraphale remained quiet for a moment before Crowley could feel the angel nod his head. “Rather. I’m very fond of this place and I was happy here for over two hundred years, but I… need a break. As it turns out, preventing the end of the world is tiring. And with my relationship with Heaven being like that, it will be in my best interest to get away from here.” He sighed. “I’m glad we’re moving away.” 

_We._

“Me too. How long have we even been in London, huh? Since 1600?” Crowley asked, his thumb mindlessly caressing the back of Aziraphale’s warm hand. He didn’t even know why he was doing that, all he knew was that it was somehow right. 

“1601,” Aziraphale corrected him. “That’s when you made “Hamlet” popular for me. One of your little demonic miracles, was it?”

Crowley scoffed. “I still prefer the funny ones. You can’t, you just can’t look me in the eye and tell me that “Much Ado About Nothing” wasn’t his best work.”

“Aw,” the angel chuckled softly. “I really liked “Hamlet”, though, I really did. It should have been a famous work without an aethereal intervention. Shakespeare was truly an extraordinarily brilliant man.”

“Uh-huh,” Crowley just murmured. The music floating from the gramophone had changed by now, but neither of them had a way of knowing if it was just a part of the record or it was either one of theirs powers slipping away from under their control and manipulating with the surroundings. It was a slower melody now, much sweeter and very much more appropriate for their slowdance. It must have been either their powers or Aziraphale chose this recording on purpose. Both seemed equally unbelievable.

There was another stretch of silence, during which they came even closer to one another, at this point holding each other as they swayed more than pretending to keep any kind of a dancing pose. That’s when Aziraphale asked: 

“Crowley?”

“What?”

“I… I was wondering,” the angel started slowly, clearly weighing his words, choosing them carefully. “And you don’t have to answer if you don’t wish to, of course, and I apologize in advance if this is nothing you wish to talk about, but… I was just thinking about, well, about all of this and it made me wonder… how long did you…?”

Crowley stiffened a little. Oh. “Right,” he exhaled slowly. “Since the Beginning,” he admitted, a bit reluctantly. This was exactly the kind of vulnerability he wanted to avoid tonight, and preferably forever. “You know, since that Day in Eden? On the Wall? Since then. Since you told me that you gave away your flaming sword, actually.”

“O-oh.” Aziraphale chuckled with a hint of embarrassment, shifting his hand on Crowley’s back more, resting it in between his shoulder blades where the space between his wings would be. “Well, I didn’t quite expect that, my dear. It was a rather shameful moment for me. We’ve just met and I had to admit that I gave away the one thing I was supposed to hold onto, against what the Almighty told me…”

“Yeah,” Crowley nodded, relaxing against Aziraphale’s touch, lowering his head to rest his chin on the angel’s shoulder. “Exactly then.” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. “You?”

Aziraphale swallowed audibly. “It was quite a bit later for me, I’m afraid. Or at least it got to me quite a bit later. It was on Golgotha, I think, during our conversation while the crucifixion was happening. When you said you were kind to Jesus…”

“I’m not kind.”

“...when you said you were kind to Jesus without any malicious or demonic intends behind this. That was the moment. When we met in Rome a few years later, I was already perfectly aware of that, I just didn’t know what to do about it or how to behave. I thought it was utterly one-sided and I would only get myself in trouble if I did anything about it…”

The tone of the music shifted yet again, to an even slower-pace but the sweetness was slowly turning to longing with a hint of sorrow, but neither of them noticed that their conversation was having an impact on the melody, too busy finally talking about what ought to had been talked about many, many years ago. “You…” Crowley scrunched his eyebrows. “You thought it was one-sided? How?” he wanted to know. “I thought I was… I thought I was anything but subtle about this.”

“I was scared, I suppose,” Aziraphale said quietly, caressing the space between Crowley’s shoulder blades. “So I’ve decided to ignore everything that could possibly give me a shred of hope that it wasn’t just me. Until 1941, that is. That when you went into that church for me? And then saved my books? That’s when I thought that you might… well, that it might not be one-sided after all.”

“Wait.” Crowley straightened his back, pulling slightly away from Aziraphale but still keeping one of his hand on the angel’s waist. “Until 1941?” he echoed. “But that’s… it that why you brought me holy water a few years later?”

Aziraphale’s cheeks flushed up again. “Well, yes… I thought that…” he cleared his throat. “I thought that you figured that out, I thought that you figured out that I’ve realized. And since it appeared to have been mutual, I assumed that even if I had brought you the holy water for whatever reason you needed it, you wouldn’t use it to hurt yourself.” 

Crowley blinked, something he didn’t do all that often given his snake eyes, but in this moment he was in quite a bit of a shock and such simple human thing seemed to help with processing it. “You… thought I’d use it to kill myself? That why you freaked out on me when I asked for it?”

“I didn’t want to lose you,” Aziraphale uttered. “Especially not like that. Granted, I got a tad heated up and I ended up losing you for nearly a century anyway, but it seemed like a vastly better option than giving you the one thing that could destroy you. But then I realized, hoped maybe, that if you did… you know, then you wouldn’t use the holy water for suicide.”

Silence fell over the bookshop as the needle of the gramophone jumped out, announcing that the recording has finished. Aziraphale and Crowley stood there, in the middle of the store just looking at each other, their hands still holding each other so impossibly close as they were, trying to process all the words they just said--the very words that remained unspoken and weighing the air around them since 4004 BC. Now it was all out, all the things they were keeping to each other for over six thousand years, still raw and still sensitive, but it was out. Weren’t they still in some sort of a shock after averting the Apocalypse and defying Heaven and Hell for each other, these things would have probably remain buried deep down, never to see the light of the day. 

“Ah, well, the music is over,” Aziraphale spoke up, breaking the tense stillness that fell over them upon all of these confessions. “I suppose that means we should get back to packing, we’re almost done with it. The moving services should be here at around nine in the morning and I’d very much like to look through everything once more to make sure that all the right books are packed up.”

“Right,” Crowley said stiffly. 

“I’m excited for it. And glad that we managed to find a cottage with enough space for a library. It would be rather insufferable for me to live without at least the smallest of libraries.” Aziraphale reached up to his bowtie and straightened it up, taking a step away, clearly with his mind already set back on his books. But as he was about to turn around and walk away, he stepped closer to the demon instead, outstretched his neck and pressed the most tender of kisses right against the snake-shaped birthmark on Crowley’s cheekbone. “Thank you for the dance, Crowley. It was quite lovely.”

Then he wandered off between the bookshelves again, busy with looking through them, pulling some of the volumes, opening them up to peek at the front covers before either putting them back away or putting them under his arm and searching for more. Meanwhile, Crowley just stood there, looking at him through the lenses of his sunglasses as the very essence of his demonic being stirred and fizzed and bubbled inside of him in a way unfamiliar to him, or at least a way that he hadn’t felt for a long, very long time--it was warm and bright and soft around the edges and it felt good.

_Well_, Crowley thought to himself as he reached up to his face, the tips of his slightly trembling fingers brushing gently over his birthmark. _Maybe this really is the rest of our lives._


End file.
